Fair Shake with Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit

Your Working Life with Caroline Dowd-Higgins

Naomi Cahn is the Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, as well as the Co-Director of the Family Law Center. Cahn is the author or editor of numerous books written for both academic and trade publishers, including Red Families v. Blue Families and Homeward Bound. In 2017, Cahn received the Harry Krause Lifetime Achievement in Family Law Award from the University of Illinois College of Law and in 2024 she was inducted into the Clayton Alumni Hall of Fame.

June Carbone is the Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Previously she has served as the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri at Kansas City; and as the Associate Dean for Professional Development and Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good at Santa Clara University School of Law. She has written From Partners to Parents and co-written Red Families v. Blue Families; Marriage Markets; and Family Law. She is a co-editor of the International Survey of Family Law.

Nancy Levit is the Associate Dean for Faculty and holds a Curator’s Professorship at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law. Professor Levit has been voted Outstanding Professor of the Year five times by students and was profiled in Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz’s book, What the Best Law Teachers Do. She has received the N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity and the Missouri Governor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. She is the author of The Gender Line and co-author of Feminist Legal Theory; The Happy Lawyer; The Good Lawyer; and Jurisprudence—Classical and Contemporary.

Book: Fair Shake: Women & The Fight to Build a Just Economy

Simon & Schuster, May 7, 2024

A stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce—why women’s progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back.

You hold in your hands a book that, finally, proposes how to fix the system, rather than how to fix the woman. No more “leaning in,” no more “girl bossing.” FAIR SHAKE explains plain and simple how the American economy is rigged to hold women back.

Legal scholars Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit have identified the winner-take-all economy as at the root of these problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. Cahn, Carbone, and Levit call this feedback loop “the triple bind,” and it works like this:

1. If women don’t compete on the same terms as men, they lose.
2. If women do compete on the same terms as men, they’re punished more harshly for their sharp elbows and misdeeds.
3. When women see the rules of the new game, they don’t want to play on those terms.

With odds like these stacked against them, it’s no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead. In an era of supposed greater equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace: even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase and recourse for discrimination and harassment become more difficult to obtain. But FAIR SHAKE suggests there is a countermovement and a way out of this. If women figure out what the nature of this new game is, they realize that the only way to fight back is to challenge the system itself.